4. AMERICAN WOMEN
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Christine Ladd-Franklin. The first of the two American women we shall discuss was induced by prevailing prejudice to abandon mathematics for psychology, a field in which she also encountered firm exclusion. Christine Ladd was born in New York in 1847. Her mother and aunt were advocates of women’s rights. Her mother died when she was 12, and she was sent to live with her father’s mother. Education for girls had come to be seen as a necessity by the American middle class, and so she was enrolled at Wesleyan Academy along with boys her age who expected to be admitted to Harvard. She herself could have no such expectations, but she did dream of attending Vassar. Her father encouraged her in her studies at Wesleyan Academy, but the grandmother she was living with was opposed to Vassar. Nevertheless, she prevailed and her mother’s sister supported her financially for the first year. At Vassar she was particularly encouraged by Maria Mitchell (1818–1889, the first American woman astronomer of note). After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in 1869, she spent nine years as a teacher of science and mathematics, writing articles on mathematics education that were published in England. Burnout, that familiar phenomenon among those who teach adolescents, finally set in, and she began to cast about for other careers. Such an opportunity came along at just the right time. In 1876 Johns Hopkins University opened in Baltimore, the first American university devoted exclusively to graduate studies. Moreover, it managed to hire one of the greatest European mathematicians, James Joseph Sylvester, who, being Jewish, could not obtain a position at Cambridge or Oxford.19 By great good fortune, the name Christine Ladd was familiar to Sylvester from her articles on education. On his recommendation the university agreed to allow her to attend lectures, but only lectures by Sylvester. This restriction was lifted after the first year, and she was able to attend lectures by William Edward Story and by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914, described by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell as “the greatest American thinker ever”). While working at Hopkins, she married Fabian Franklin (1853–1939), a young professor of mathematics who was born in Hungary but whose parents had moved to the United States when he was 2 years old. They were to have two children in rapid succession, one of whom died in infancy. After her marriage, she wrote her name with a hyphen as Ladd-Franklin. Under the influence of Peirce she wrote a dissertation on logic which was published in a volume edited by Peirce in 1883. She published several papers in the first internationally renowned American mathematical journal, The American Journal of Mathematics, during the 1880s under the name Christine Ladd. From her training she was, by any objective standards, one of the best-qualified mathematicians in the United States. Nevertheless, Sylvester and Peirce together could not fulfill the mentoring role that Weierstrass performed for Kovalevskaya, Cayley for Charlotte Angas Scott and Klein for Grace Chisholm Young. She was unable to obtain either the Ph. D. degree or an academic position. Although she had overcome the first obstacle, getting her family’s support for an education, the second and third stymied her for the rest of her life. She had always been interested in areas of science other than mathematics, and her choice of mathematics as a major at Vassar had been partly the result of being excluded, as a woman, from the physics laboratories. In the mid-1880s she began to take an interest in psychology, especially the psychology of color perception.
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An earlier stay at the University of Virginia in 1841, when slavery still existed, had ended in disaster for Sylvester.